My first drink was a pint of Jack Daniels straight from the bottle on my 15th birthday. I have an entire, terrible story about the rest of the night that I could relate later, after work, but suffice it to say that I ended up in deep, deep trouble and having to clean up copious amounts of vomit the next morning while still retching and in agony.

Then I got to go to church in pretty much the same state, because I had to play in the handbell choir.

My parents gave me half a pint (10 oz) of light ale with the Sunday dinner from when I was about 10. my first, illegal, drink out with friends was a pint of execrable keg bitter in a pub in west London, which cost the sterling equivalent of 17 cents.

This may be a good test of my thesis that people have become significantly more socially conservative in some ways since I was a kid.

My folks occasionally let me have sips of beer and wine from the time I was fairly young--nine or ten maybe. When I was a young teenager, a friend of mine and I would raid the liquor cabinet occasionally to sip what was there (creme de menthe is the only thing I remember drinking, but there must have been other things). This was unexceptional when/where I was raised. The first time I drank an entire beer was probably when I was 15. I occasionally drank beer, wine (one of my classmates would sometimes sneak it to school in a Fresca bottle and I would have a sip at lunch) and hard liquor thereafter for about a year and then quit. And have not had a drink since.

(My first beer was consumed at a keg party thrown by Pa/ul Bat/es' older brother in 9th or 10th grade, I think 10th -- Pa/ul was marginally in my circle but I went to the party with some friends of mine who were seniors (juniors?) and knew the brother. The beer was so weak. Plus you had to stand on a long line to get access to the keg. I'm pretty sure I did not get drunk after drinking 2 cups of the beverage. First time being shitfaced drunk (there may have been intervening drinks, not sure) was in 10th grade (I'm pretty sure) playing quarters at my next-door neighbor Ke/nny Ma/nzo/ni's house before a keg party he was throwing that evening. First time actually enjoying drunkenness was much later, like probably after I had left college.

My first drink was probably a bottle of Molson's; I think I was fifteen. I didn't get sick, so it wasn't very memorable.

Giving sips of beer or wine to kids is no big deal to Croatians, though I hated alcohol until I purposely took steps to acquire a taste for it as a teenager. Ages ago I was in a restaurant with my dad, a Croatian friend of his, and his friend's ten year old son; the friend ordered a beer for himself and then poured half in his son's glass.

4 -- this was my reaction to the post also. I found it surprising that Becks' introduction to drinking should have occurred in her senior year, that her first "drink [she] kept down" should have been purchased by her mother when they were visiting her college, that she should not have drunk any beer until she was actually in college.

Also: her anecdote about her mother buying her vodka collinses reminds me of something -- I was 18 and having lunch with my father and a colleague of his at (I'm pretty sure) the Modesto Stuart Anderson's and on my own initiative ordered a whiskey. My dad did not say anything and the waitress served me but we had words about it later on.

My mother had an exaggerated fear of alcohol, so I'm sure I didn't taste it until I was in my late teens. I've had my children drinking small amounts of wine of sabbaths since they were old enough to hold real glasses, and have let my son taste different beers when I've ordered them. I wasn't scarred by my experience but it is typical of the things about my own upbringing I wanted to move beyond.

playing with a handbell choir would not have been the best treatment available to me at the time

It was like having nails driven into my skull. Being the big teenaged guy, I of course had the giant, low-end bells (BOOOONG, BOOOOONG, BOOOONG). Didn't miss a note, though. We played the opening music, then marched back up the aisle. I continued straight out the front doors and dry heaved into the bushes, then dragged myself to the car to moan in the back seat for the next hour 'til the services were over and my wholly unsympathetic family ("would you like biscuits and gravy for breakfast?") emerged.

Apparently I drank the better part of a bottle of some sort of disgusting dessert wine (Madeira?) which my parents left unguarded at a party when I was about five. I had to be stomach-pumped. I have no memory of it.

By the way: is it still easy for the underaged to drink in NYC bars and purchase at NYC liquor stores? I came here when I was 18 and was shocked and gladdened to find that I could drink quasi-legally, ie without subterfuging with somebody older to putchase my beverage for me.

Sophomore year in HS; My 30 yr old uncle's wedding, which was ten years past the norm; got utterly falling down smashed and started psychoanalyzing my immediate and extended family. This was the pattern for the next twenty years. Was always a loud obnoxious and futilely mean drunk, but never liked alcohol despite those benefits. However you might see my dour and anti-social nature, it becomes immeasurably worse under alcohol. A smile laugh or dance is aborted on the third shot.

I do very much like the taste of a fine sippin liquor. Shame there be alcohol in it.

my dad used to let me had sips of beer when I was little, and heavily watered wine at mealtimes, which was supposed to inculcate a relaxed, european attitude towards drinking. the first time I ever got drunk on purpose I was 7, over at a party at my best friend's trailer. strawberry daiquiris. we can all see how well that turned out. I didn't get sick or anything at the time, though; I had a lot of fun. when I was in college in NYC I too was surprised/pleased by the general not caring about the legal drinking age.

my dad used to let me had sips of beer when I was little, and heavily watered wine at mealtimes, which was supposed to inculcate a relaxed, european attitude towards drinking. the first time I ever got drunk on purpose I was 7, over at a party at my best friend's trailer. strawberry daiquiris. we can all see how well that turned out. I didn't get sick or anything at the time, though; I had a lot of fun. when I was in college in NYC I too was surprised/pleased by the general not caring about the legal drinking age.

hey, that wasn't my fault, man! I was holding my OCT of thucydides under my chin and it fell on the touch pad as I was hitting post! likely story, I know. but wait, becks, have you really never gotten puking drunk? years of heroin use obviously gave me a blasé attitude about vomiting, but I don't think I know any adults who have never, ever gotten so drunk they booted. hm. some christians, I guess.

31: Me neither, assuming (as I think we must) that the incident at the college reunion was due to a bad clam and not to the three beers I had. One thing is I have a pretty low tolerance so I'm probably in my happy zone well before I'm going to vomit.

I have no idea when my first drink was, on account of having had wine at various dinners (and then there's passover, but I don't know at what age we started getting real wine (as opposed to grape juice, not Manischewitz)) since relatively young.

Had sips of various things my dad let me try from about 7, but didn't start drinking until I was into my twenties. My grandfathers on both sides were alcoholics who drank themselves to death. I don't think either one made it past age 65. Needless to say, I was a bit leery of heading down that path.

While he was still in HS, I taught my son how to to drink reasonably and avoid hangovers. But in his freshman year of college his friends taught him to binge drink.

For him to have refused to have learned this additional skill would have been highly uncool, because you know, puking can be the high point of a wonderful evening. You want to have stories to tell your grandchildren.

Further to my 6: Did any of you not particularly enjoy the getting-drunk you did as a kid but do so anyway in an unreflective way? Did you further come to really enjoy (mild) drunkenness after you were say 25? I enjoyed marijuana but the alcohol just seemed like an obligation. (Also -- you young'uns who did not drink until relatively late in life -- what about the weed?)

4 - My immediate family never drank much growing up. I could probably count on both hands the number of times I saw either of my parents drink anything alcoholic as a child. It's not that they're anti-alcohol or anything, I just don't think either cared for it (although that appears to have changed, I've noticed on my last few trips home. They'll occasionally have a drink with dinner now.)

22 - The youngest brother gets to hang out with all of his TKD friends. He'll be too busy to notice or care, I bet.

23 - "A reader speaks!". This is SO me. The word I embarrassingly realized a couple years ago I was butchering because I always read, but not heard, it was "apropos".

31 - Yeah, I've never been puking drunk. I think because, like Weiner, I tend to get loopy pretty far before that.

4: Same here. First "true drink" came at around 13 during a family trip to France, fwiw.

16: Oh god, apricot brandy. I ended up in a hospital with mild alcohol poisoning and severe dehydration because of a skunky swig (maybe three shots?) of that damn stuff. Still haven't forgiven the guy who gave it to me either.

31, 42: I've been puking drunk more times than I can count. Seems that an excess of alcohol irritates my stomach lining or something; once I hit a certain limit, *blam*, it's all coming back up. The catch is that that limit can vary from 2 drinks to 20 without warning...

Not counting sacramental Manischewitz, my first drink was either a hard cider at some college party, or a shot of Southern Comfort at some other college party. I can't really remember the chronology; let's go with the latter, it's more impressive.

We were always permitted to have small glasses of wine at meals (also meant to induce a european attitude toward booze), but the first time I was ever drunk was off a bottle of Sloe Gin when I was 15 or so.

I don't understand mean drunks, either (no one understands them--maybe that's what makes them so mean). I just become obnoxiously talkative.

They're rivvles

Whenever I see the word, I still hear a high-school friend pronouncing "pseudo" as "sway-do."

This jibes with my experience -- but I learned pretty quickly. I think I smoked on like 3 occasions before I figured out how to get high. FTR I was a junior in high school (and 16) the first time I smoked, and on summer break after my junior year (so 17) the first time I got high.

I drank fairly young -- underage drinking is easy in New York and my parents were cool about it. I'm an unfortunately entertaining drunk: I'm a very inhibited person generally, and I become quite assertive? expansive? nuts? after my third or fourth drink. And it doesn't put me to sleep, I stay active and energetic and really really stupid for a very long time.

I don't remember when I first had alcohol, but an early memory of it is when I was young (12ish maybe?) going to the family passover sedar and drinking several glasses of manischewitz sweet wine. Sugar + alcohol + kid = silly wildness.

I never got drunk until college, where I discovered that my liver is much stronger than my stomache (I've never had a hangover, but I have had a couple nights of shall we say... stomache distress). This usually only happens with liquore, and usually only if I disobey the rules of drinking (vodka and tequila are not a good combination, believe you me).

I learned to chug vodka when I was 18. I didn't enjoy the flavor, so I figured out a way to pour it down straight without a swallowing action. You can kill yourself that way, but the bottle I learned on was only 1/4 full. I did end up in the drunk tank.

Well, there is the basketball game where I started drinking brandy at 5, was drunk by the time the game started, committed the Incredibly Horrific Sexist Act in full view of 5000 spectators, got slapped for it in full view...and then was unable to handle said girl's inexplicable interest in newly revealed Bob.

I don't remember my first 'drink'. My grandparents allowed us to have a small shandy with Sunday dinner from when we were quite small.

However, I did get interviewed by the police when I was 12 for underage drinking. We went out boozing for New Year and my friend's very straigh-laced parents took their own son to the police station the next day to report him. He named names and the police came to my house to 'interrogate' me.

My parents found the whole episode pretty amusing.

So I suppose 12 or 13 was about the age I started drinking which was pretty normal where I'm from, I suppose. It was pretty irregular from then until I was about 15 by which time I was going to pubs a couple of times a month and going most weekends before I turned 16. I did my first gig, playing guitar in a biker club, when I was 16.

This is not exactly an EDS but when I was 16 I had a keg party at my house while my parents were away -- I drank heavily and passed out and the guests proceeded to trash the place and steal my mother's quite valuable flute.

My brother was down visiting last summer -- he was 13 at the time -- and I took him to the pub and also let him have a glass of wine with his dinner. I had no intention of getting him drunk, obviously. However, the whole demystification thing is healthy.

In the hope of earning some points for the "Miss Congeniality" award, I want you all to know that in reading many of the posts from our American friends, I am biting my fucking tongue until the blood flows.

The friend who corrected me on "teetotaler" said that I had a propensity for mispronouncing things because I read a lot and didn't watch enough television.

This still terrifies me. My vocabulary has been gleaned from books. Sometimes those words make it into papers. Then someone says, O Cala, read this paper out loud to the class, and then I realize I've never heard this word before and frantically substitute synonyms that I can pronounce so no one realizes I went to public school.

First drink would be communion wine, age seven, but that's not a drink. First real drink was some amaretto, age 16 or so, in a silver shot-glass sized cup on Christmas, provided by parents.

One time when I was 16 I got smashed (vodka?) and ended up 3/4 passed on on the bathroom floor in my parents house (at a party I was hosting) and several of my friends -- obviously themselves too drunk -- thought for some reason that I was faking? being overly dramatic? and that if I just had incentive enough I would get up off the floor and get back to hosting the damn party. So they all stood around me and pissed all over me. I didn't get up (I remember just kind of saying something like "could you please stop that?"), and they sort of collectively shrugged and said 'well I guess he wasn't faking, must be really sick' and left me there, soaking wet, and rejoined to the party.

Did I mention that some of my h.s. friends were real assholes?

(Btw- I don't really consider that a top 10 EDS. Yes, I've been waaaay too drunk way too many times.)

I'm one of these people too. It doesn't seem to happen much any more -- I haven't run into a word that I wanted to use but was grotesquely mispronouncing for quite a while -- but I'm still edgy about it.

At my last job, a woman who was leaving the company had a going away party at her house in Raleigh. I got lost trying to find her house and consequently didn't stop at a drive-thru to get any food in my stomach (nearly all of my embarrassing drinking stories begin with having skipped dinner). When I finally got there, the party was in full swing. Had several glasses of wine, then several gin and tonics, then came to several hours later on the couch with the woman from the cube next to mine straddling me like a cowgirl riding a bronco and pretending to lasso things while other people took pictures.

Uh oh.

So the next day, I asked another coworker if I had done anything embarrassing during the long period between the end of my memories and passing out.

"No, you were cute. But do you remember the Hour of Truth?"

"The what?"

"The Hour of Truth. You were in the kitchen and loudly declared that anybody could ask you any question they wanted and you'd give them an honest answer."

Oh no. No no no no no no. Turns out my revelations weren't particularly revealing, though. People either don't know how to ask the right questions or are entirely kinder than I'd be in the same situation.

I went about pronouncing 'chaos' as 'tcha-os' until I was about 13. Wierdly, I knew there was a word 'kaos' and I knew it meant the same thing as 'tcha-os' but somehow never connected the two together.

A) Alcohol unleashed my inner sociopathic asshole, hidden from even myself most times or

B) Being, sober, the quiet paranoid over in the corner, the diminished capacity of having fewer available neurons frightened me, made me feel vulnerable and defensive

I have never understood junkies and drunks. I like to think, really need to think and be aware, and vastly prefer stimulants to depressants. I am still addicted to coffee, tobacco, and sugar, and really hate to sleep.

79, 83: Me, too. In fact, "apropos" is one of the one's that has gotten me before. I even do it with words that I've heard and even previously pronounced properly: rapport, for example. I don't know why it makes me feel like such a jackass, either.

88 -- I had an exactly parallel experience with "half-assed". I heard people say it and thought it was a word spelled "halfast" -- I'm pretty sure I used this in a written piece or two, not realizing that the word I was seeking was one inappropriate for a school paper -- meanwhile I had read the word "half-assed" and knew it was pronounced the same as my invented adjective -- didn't figure out what was going on until sometime in early adulthood.

Most of my friends have incredibly stupid drunk stories from their younger years, too. They just happened at a much younger age.

Apart from throwing up a couple of times, I never really did anything particularly embarrassing while drunk. When I was younger I was gifted with a much higher capacity for alcohol than most of my friends, so I was the guy still conscious at the end of the night chatting to girls in the kitchen and making fun of the drunks in the other room.

That's not really the case anymore. A few times recently I've over-estimated my drinking capacity. Luckily, I just talk bullshit and repeat myself a lot when drunk. I rarely say or do anything outrageous.

I don't get tequila's reputation. I think it's psychosomatic; everyone's always blabbing about how tequila has all these special effects on you!!!! but I've never experienced anything particular about it.

I think it's the way people drink it. Tequila isn't anymore potent than any other spirit of equivalent proof, but it seems like when people are ordering up rounds of tequila shots they're drinking with a fairly narrow range of purpose; they seem intent on getting a little wild. I think that impacts how much is consumed and in what timeframe, and maybe has the effect of loosening inhibitions a little in and of itself.

97: Maybe, but almost everyone I know in real life has a tequila story. And the world at my age can be divided into those who will not drink tequila and those who still invite tcha-os into their lives.

Tequila is a stimulant (or rather has a stimulant as an ingredient - agave?), whereas most alcohol is a depressant. (Tequila's stimulant counteracts the depressant effect, is what I'm trying to say). Which is why it tends to make people more crazy -- they're a lot more ramped up while drunk then they are on most other typoes of alcohol.

99: I must be your stepmother-in-law. I thought there were two different words - to mislead somebody was to literally lead them in the wrong direction, whereas to misle somebody was to cheat on them or lie to them or something.

Also, I thought "anxiety" was pronounced "ank-shety" until about age 18. It obviously should be pronounced that way.

Everyone has some kind of psychosomatically potent drink. Grolsch beer, despite it's relatively low % alchohol, is associated with a couple of 14 year old booze incidents* that means that, to this day, I tend to be wary of drinking it.

* I got beaten up outside a nightclub by some football casuals. Cue: 8 hours of vomiting with badly bruised ribs the next day.

96:I was not always mean. Good wine(spatlese, auslese, eiswein) was mellowing. Gin, especially gin and tonic, I remember as being okay. I just really liked the taste of fine whiskey, straight up in shotglasses.

I think there are, or mythically reputed to be, stimulative properties to certain liquors. Tequila being one. Black Jack had a reputation in my day of making people especially aggressive and combative.

Tequila is the most awesomest mixed-drink alcohol. Tequila sunrises are my choice, if I have to drink something other than beer.

I can't get a buzz at all off whiskey. I can just drink it and drink it until I get sick, and never feel drunk.

The last time I got seriously drunk, so drunk that I threw up, was at an office Xmas party in 2000. It was on a weekday night, and I went straight there after working a 12-hour shift. There was tons of food at the party but I was so anxious about socializing with my co-workers that I just drank, without eating. Apparently I didn't do anything really embarrassing, just the "you're my best pal!" kind of thing. Which is what I tend to do when I'm drunk.

Tarrou's got it -- it's the traditional American "I'm going to get really really fucked up and stupid" liquor, so people react that way to it. (Margaritas are also very easy to drink compared to how strong they are; like anything fruity and refreshing tasting, if you're not thinking about what you're doing, it's easy to get drunk off them because you were thirsty. One of the most out of control parties I was ever at was a Peace Corps party where the host made a five-gallon bucket of really vicious punch, but with enough fruit juice that it tasted pretty innocuous. People were playing volleyball in the hot sun, and they'd come inside and knock back a big cup of this stuff because they were thirsty. The compound was strewn with bodies well before dark.)

I can't get a buzz at all off whiskey. I can just drink it and drink it until I get sick, and never feel drunk.

So what's the problem? Or am I the only one who likes drinking but not being drunk, and who thinks that drinking your booze in shot form is silly because you can't taste it as long or as well? (OR PERHAPS the problem is that it's hard to tell when you've had too much.)

I had a tequila night on a date once. The young lady and I weren't having any fun with one another, we acknowledged that we weren't having any fun with one another, so we decided the only thing to do was to have a tequila shot in every bar in lower Manhattan.

Margaritas are also very easy to drink compared to how strong they are; like anything fruity and refreshing tasting, if you're not thinking about what you're doing, it's easy to get drunk off them because you were thirsty

Exactly. Tequila doesn't affect me differently so much as it seems like I get blindsided by the drunkeness.

My surmise about 75 was that the commentary being bitten back was something along the lines of "Silly Americans getting puking drunk. Grownups don't drink more than they can manage in a reasonable fashion." Although if dsquared were saying it, it'd be more entertaining, and would probably include the word 'cunt'.

111: It's not exactly a problem -- I don't like the stuff, but my ex was a Scotch afficionado so I tried to get into it; I never could, but in the process of trying I noticed that it didn't make me tipsy in the least. Which I thought was weird.

111:You would dilute your Glenlivet or Bushmill's with ice or water in order to intensify the taste? Am I missing something here?

Blackjack story: Playing chess with a friend, (Vietnam vet with colostomy bag), stranger opens apartment door, walks in, sits in chair. We interrogate, he is unresponsive. Stares at floor, around room as if wondering where he is.

Maybe it's that the taste is masked enough that it doesn't register as a drink until I've had too much. But I don't do tequila shots, nor is it really in my crowd as the party shot to do, so I reject the pscyho-somatic explanation. We're talking margaritas and tacos here, not wild partying, and one margarita makes the room spin. Pleasantly so, though.

116, 119: I actually thought it was a reference to how few commenters here have been (admit to being?) puking drunk. Since that's the metric by which the kids round these here parts seem to judge the quality of their evening.

110- I don't know, I'd have to look around and don't have time right now. I don't see anything on wikipedia, although the tequila entry there is pretty short. Although it does contain this piece of news:

"Then the salt is licked off the hand, tequila is drunk and the fruit slice is quickly bitten... In Germany and some other countries, tequila is often consumed in much the same way, sometimes substituting cinnamon and slices of orange for salt and lemon."

If you weren't having any fun, why didn't you both just go home? Were you on Blind Date, and had to keep things going for the sake of the show?

It was a truly strange evening. It was our second date, and on our first one, we had a great time. But we were drunk for that first date. So we agreed that the only thing to do was get drunk as quickly as possible, since hey, we were already out on the town, and why not try to make it a bender if nothing else.

I don't remember much after the first couple of bars. And I never heard from the lady again.

In Europe*, places sometimes ask if you want a silver or gold tequila.

Silver = with lime and salt.
Gold = with cinammon and orange.

* Prague, anyway.

A friend of mine sometimes drinks 'stuntmen' with tequila. Which is one of those insane, 'prove you're hard'* drinks. Wikipedia claims it's a Jackass invention. However, I find that dubious given how long he's been doing this, and he picked it up from someone else.

Don't have much of an arrest record. I was heading off to the drive-in to smoke ze weed when my uncle the alcoholic (the one of wedding party) started mixing me Manhattans. 2 Bushmills, I sweet, 1 dry. After the second the deadman's curve on the 70 mph country road put me thru the fence and into the cornfield. Cuffed and cursing cops all the way to the station, but they put me thru the breathalyzer 4 times for they did not like the readings.

Lady prosecutor a week later says:"All we got is reckless, how about that pot under the seat?" I sez:"What pot?" She says:"DUI" I sez:"You betcha."

The main one of these that I have direct experience of is the California Dr. Pepper, which is a shot of ½ amaretto (kahlua?), ½ Bacardi (tm) 151, set ablaze and dunked into a beaker of American Corn Lager, and chugged. Surprisingly tasty and quickly intoxicating, but ultimately prissy.

Also there was a popular "prove you're hard" drink when I was in college called Long Island Iced Tea, but I never drank it and don't know what it was.

"Prove you're hard" drinks. Northern California, guy comes home from vacation to find his house infested with Black Widows. After fumigation, we celebrate. First you fill your mouth with shaved ice, slosh, spit it out, and shoot the Everclear. "Hell Bent for Self-Destruction" we called ourselves.
...
The DUI story really revolves around my 1970 T-Bird. The one with the wrap-around back seat. 5000 pounds with the 454 (or whatever) and very plosh seats great suspension you could reach 90 without noticing. They don't make cars like that anymore.

A little bit of Olympia ("It's the Water") in my little A&W Mug, given by my dad when I was about 7. I found it revolting and it made my eyes water. I didn't drink again until I was 20. Later that same year, making up for lost time, I had my Incredibly Drunk Moment involving something called an Infarto de Poyicardio. This would be a shot, sold at a shot bar - a Spanish college invention, apparently - that means Myocardial Infarction, which consisted of very cold anise liqueur and blue curacao, the former ensuring you can't taste anything the rest of the night. Tequila, gin, whisky - all tasted like water. I drank a lot of 'water' that night.

Re spoken v written words and their pronunciation: mores (as in social morays) and imprimatur. Eh.

I think my first time I was 17 or 18, and we drove to a liquor store that we thought might let me buy. They did, but not without the woman behind the counter giving me a long look as she handed me the bottle and saying, pointedly, "Merry Christmas." It was Wild Turkey vodka. No one should ever drink Wild Turkey vodka.

We took it home and started drinking while playing cards, like we were conducting some drunkenness experiment, instead of trying to have fun. Then, somehow having heard of our plan, a bunch of people showed up, "We heard you were having a party!" Fucking Canadians. But it was more fun with them around, and I puked, but I was discreet, and no one noticed.

And now I remember that I do have one semi-embarrassing drinking story. Playing drunk Truth or Dare at a party in high school, one friend had to put his socks on his ears and run naked around the block, and I had to perform a fellatio on a bottle held between a guy's (that same damn Canadian again!) legs. Good party, I must say.

For completeness: I'm with gswift in never having tried anything else, not even a cigarette, and I'm totally an "I love humanity, let's all love each other" drunk.

The Everclear night (there was only one), after the blackout, was the night I somehow read Lewis's "Last Battle". Freaked out by the nastiness in a children's book.

War stories. Yecch. Next I will reminiscing on the nights of Wild Turkey and acid. It really all just sucked, and I wish I didn't remember so much of it. Not a glass of wine since 1983, and never ever getting even a buzz on again, until the terminal diagnosis.

First drunk: Age 3, when I got up before my parents had cleared the detritus of a cocktail party and finished off the remains of drinks in all the glasses on the coffee table. I blame the resultant brain damage for my failure to win the Nobel prize in mathematics, and, indeed, for my refusal to proceed beyond theoretical calculus in college. Not that I was a maths major.

Second drunk: Age 13, when my father sat me down and fed me sips of a variety of alcoholic substances in order to demonstrate a) how little it took to render me incoherent and b) how a Scotch-gin-rum-bourbon-beer hangover feels. I attribute my embrace of weed and hallucinogens in college to this experiment.

Most embarassing drunk: Puking my guts out after drinking the better part of a bottle of sloe gin in a fit of depression at a science fiction convention party a month after I left my first marriage. Embarassment compunded by a cretinous opportunist hitting on me as he held my hair back from the edge of the toilet. NOTE: Do not, under any circumstance, make a pass at a woman who is in the act of turning her gastro-intestinal tract into a Klein bottle. It will not get you laid and she will remember you forever as an idiot.

And so you have before you "Balsam of Canaan." In plain speech it is called a Black Fox and the liquid is brown, of moderate strength and a staunch aroma that is really not an aroma, but a hymn. A hymn of democratic youth, because this cocktail fosters vulgarity and dark forces in the drinker.

Hard man drinks are drinks that taste awful--Dead Nazis, Prairie Fires--or contain an insane ammount of alcohol and taste awful: 3 Wise Men on a Turkey Hunt, "homemade" Peppermint Schnapps consisting of a bottle of Everclear topped off by a bottle of peppermint extract.

I should be most ashamed of the drunken driving, but the 16-yr-old's Horribly Sexist Act still bothers me after 30 years. All the dudes patted me on the back, saying "Right on, guy! Far Out!" My face was redder than anything the slap generated. You may understand that it happened in the center of a basketball arena, that I was not arrested. But I will leave it to your imaginations, so as to inhinit forgiveness. I don't deserve any.

Killed a horse once. Was dead sober, the horse had broken the fence, crossing the road, and the shock of seeing it turn to run straight in front of me instead of to a side probably slowed my reaction and braking time. The 16-yr-old girl said "It's not his fault, Dad." and Dad went off to get his gun.

My first drunk (though not drink) was when I was 12, and happened on the same day that, for the first time, I bought my albums with my own money: something by Cheap Trick, and AC/DC's Back in Black. That night, when my mum and her boyfriend went out for dinner, I filled a pint glass with a mixture of every different type of spirit they had, cranked "Have a drink on me" up to 14, and, over the next hour, downed the entire glass while listening to that same song over and over.

My memory of the experience: a brief period of running up and down the stairs, leaping over the sofa, singing along with AC/DC, and thinking that this was the greatest feeling ever.

What I don't remember, but which certainly is true: 1) My younger brother finding me lying on my back in the bathroom, gargling my own puke. 2) Getting my stomach pumped, while my poor dear mum looked on in horror.

After college I worked at DOJ and was assigned to work with one attorney who LOVED scotch. She got me hooked too, though lately I've been enamored of bourbon. Woodford Reserve is currently on the menu. Nice stuff, though a friend who's a bourbon-phile has other (doubtless pricier) bourbons for me to try...

The first time I got drunk on tequila, I woke up the next morning in the middle of the college chapel -- literally in the middle of the center aisle, where my friends had left me. I remember opening my eyes and thinking as I closed them, "This is funny. I'm having a dream that I'm in the chapel, but now I'm going to wake up in my bed." Fortunately, I went to a school with a well-deserved reputation for godlessness, so the place wasn't in use on Sunday morning.

First time I ever got hammered was in 7th grade at the home of a retired couple who went to my parents' church. It was their housewarming party, and they hid a big bowl of "grown-up punch" in the kitchen, which I promptly found and then consumed in what were pretty serious quantities for a 7th-grader. Our hosts were in their late 60's, and this was the 1980's, so this "punch" was made in the style of most alcoholic drink recipes of the '40s and '50s: pour a shitload of liquor into a bowl, add some ice, picture fruit punch in your mind while you stir, serve until blacking out. Having had four glasses, I went on to compliment the lady of the house on their "real nice double-wide," which she insisted was a "manufactured home," which I insisted was a double-wide, and thus basically everything about my personality was born.

Immediately after, my mom took me to a rich cousin's wedding and I talked loudly about the size of the bow on the matron of honor's ass, then passed out in a pew to my mother's tremendous relief.

She hated the people whose housewarming it was, by the way, and so she was thrilled that I had pissed them off. She is also a total teetotaler and so figured this would be a great way to make me swear off alcohol for the rest of my life. It didn't work.

And, finally, when I was in college a bunch of my friends and I all had habits of mispronouncing words we were used to seeing in books but which no one in our various hometowns ever spoke. We called it "reader's vocabulary."

First drink was some kind of Canadian ice beer (Labatt?) in some one bar town in the middle of northern Ontario.
Never got puking drunk- got close once, but I have a strong will. Never smoked anything you inhale intentionally- had a couple cigar puffs.
Where can you get absinthe? Just for the novelty.
Useless fact- Wild Turkey is the official alcohol of the MIT student newspaper.

My first drink was early sophomore year of college, in my very early post-christian days (in which I didn't drink because Romans 13 says that as long as its a morally neutral issue you should obey the law). I was at a frisbee tournament called Clambake, where after the games they have a giant clambake. Now, I was obviously very thirsty, but all I could find to drink was beer. So I thought what the heck, I'll try some. So I poured a glass and had a taste...

Not sure when my first drink was -- my dad gave me sips of wine and beer occasionally starting when I was around 10 or 12 -- but the first time I ever drank specifically intending to get drunk was splitting a pint of peach schnapps and some beers with my cousin when I was 14. There wasn't enough of either to do us serious damage, or so I recall.

First hangover: Senior prom. Vodka shots, primarily.

Worst hangover: My NYC going-away party in late '83: I drank a case of beer in eight hours, well above my ordinary intake. I was sick for two days.

Best drunk: Winter of my junior year in college, we had a flu epidemic that shut down classes for the first time since JFK's assassination. In celebration, my house had a "flu party" in which we served "cough medicine": a 50-50 mix of Everclear and Hi-C, with confectioner's sugar mixed in to make it taste good. We had bodies on the front-hall floor before 8 p.m.

Oh, I love drinking stories. After several long years of pregnancy and/or breastfeeding, I embraced my inner 16 year old again a year or two back. I'm over it again now. But less than a year ago I got so drunk that my partner wouldn't speak to me for the whole of the next day. I had some friends here, and it was the day George Best died - which was the problem - we started drinking when we heard the news. By 6pm we were comparing nipples, and it went downhill from there.

First time I got drunk I was fourteen, on cheap tramp cider, on a camping trip with 3 friends (about 2 miles away from my house). But I much prefer marijuana really.

199: You know how favorite-drink-of-the-season will spread through a social circle, and all of a sudden everyone switches to a particular cocktail for a while? When I was waiting tables at the country club in my hometown in the early '90s, that happened with Wild Turkey and the country club set. All of a sudden everyone wanted Wild Turkey, straight, on the rocks. Goddamn but we had some hammered-assed old people falling all over the place.

My preferred cocktail is a Manhattan, but I have few preferences as to label. My current preferred liquor-and-mixer fun-drink is Maker's and Diet Coke, which is too awesome for words.

175: Round these parts, Jager is far more popular than Goldschlager, although the two together -- sometimes called a Dead Nazi, sometimes Liquid Cocaine, sometimes Liquid Heroin (the latter two names apply to a bunch of other drinks too) -- was reasonably popular as well. Popular amongst guys at any rate; with the girls, it was always bloody Lemon Drops (chilled Citron with a sugared lemon slice).

And a great truth borne of several years obseravation: no story that begins "So we were drinking Jager..." ends well. My favorite example of this was the story which began "So we were drinking Jager..." and ended ten minutes later with "So there we were, butt-naked in a cactus patch outside of Tijuana..."

Good drunk stories? Don't have many. Spent a weekend with a bunch of retired movie stunt cowboys in Prunedale California. Most were in their 60s and 70s and had stories to tell. Fell down the side of a hill, had a blackout, talked thru the night about California as Atlantis and living every day as if it were your last. That is a good memory.

Talked French poetry and Afghanistan with a guy on the California cliffs, pretty funny because we didn't share a language. I would say "Villon?" and he would go "Oui,Oui" and recite. "Valery?" "Non, non." Later that night were some Rainbow people with the flatbed and the stars and old-timey country on the radio, Jimmie Rodgers and Carter Family and Flatt & Scruggs singing plaints and prayers.

Forgot to mention, in re the OJ above: my first buzzes were probably actually from OJ. I kid you not. Went to school in the (sorta) tropics with my lunch in a plastic box inside a large black backpack. It apparently got so hot in there that the OJ inside would literally start fermenting by lunch. I just thought the OJ had a pleasant tang (and nice fizz) to it, never really paid it much mind; it wasn't until senior year of college that I realized I must've been getting my drink on all through junior high.

no story that begins "So we were drinking Jager..." ends well. My favorite example of this was the story which began "So we were drinking Jager..." and ended ten minutes later with "So there we were, butt-naked in a cactus patch outside of Tijuana..."

212 - Real absinthe - i.e., that containing thujone - is still illegal in the US. Customs will seize it if one tries to carry it in or order it by mail. Faux Absinthe, which does not contain wormwood, is legally available. To drink the stuff with thujone, go to Europe.

DE is wrong on two counts. First, real, that is, distilled, absinthe actually has a very low thujone content (it does have thujone, but so does sage, so if that's what you're interested in, go to the supermarket). Second, while you can't sell or produce absinthe in the states, if someone sends it to you through the mail, say because you bought it online, that's completely kosher.

First alcohol is lost in the mists of time. My dad made wine at home, so I tasted that a lot (I remember really liking the blueberry wine when I was 7 years old or so). My mom also would occasionally give me hot milk with Jameson's in it when I couldn't sleep - the earliest I remember that is about 11. But I never had wine or beer with meals, or was particularly interested in trying things out of the liquor cabinet. As a teenager, I once went out with a couple of my cousins who said (to their parents and mine) that we were going to the movies, and then was shocked when they pulled into a dead-end road nearby that was well known as a hangout and brought out a case of beer. I didn't have any and felt awkward the whole time, and when I got back, I felt really bad pretending to have gone to see a movie.

First actual drink was when I was 18, in college, and went with some older friends to a brewpub before we all went to play in a game. They ordered beer confidently, and nobody ever checked IDs.

First time getting drunk was maybe six months after that, at a small party. I drank a lot of wine. I was taking a signals-and-systems class at the time, so when I reached for a light switch in the bathroom and missed, I thought to myself "huh, delay in the feedback loop". Tried again more slowly and got it. I had the occasional drink at parties, but I think that was pretty much it for actually feeling intoxicated until I was 21. At that point I took a beer-tasting class (it was kind of the overflow from the ultra-popular, years-long-wait-list wine-tasting class), and settled into a steady life of craft beer drinking.

Becoming seriously ill while drinking didn't happen until years later, when I was 24, maybe. Apparantly cheap Scotch is hazardous, and the "tell" that I'm too drunk is that I start talking loudly and exuberantly about the design of nuclear weapons.

237: A shot of beer every minute, for 100 minutes. I've never seen anyone make it past the mid-70s--attempts were rare themselves--but I suspect my college crowd was relatively dweeby and simply didn't have the fortitude that I would expect of yours.

You're too young to remember the beer fridge, which was a civilized institution for the underage -- the house bought beer, and house members could purchase it out of the fridge and have the cost placed on their housebill. It went in the great MIT alcohol crackdown of the early '90s, but it was nice; no one was getting hammered, you could just have a beer when you wanted one.

242- You can get some microbrews that are pretty high alcohol- barleywine really can be as strong as wine. It's fairly hard to do on the horse piss varieties- I don't think you can get alcohol poisoning from 4% beer, you'll puke first. I remember some genius in high school who realized that O'douls has 0.5% alcohol and figured he could get drunk since he could buy a case legally.

Re: Century Club, the college kids nowadays do something similiar calling it a Power Hour: a shot of beer per minute for sixty minutes. Often there's a mix tape (or CD) on which the song changes once a minute. I played once, and by 20 minutes in I was complaining that the beer was too watery and, godammit, I like that song and want to hear the whole thing, this game sucks.

239- I got into the wine tasting class off the wait list- I signed up a year in advance, definitely worth it. If I remember, they let you sign up as long as you were still at MIT and then take the class later even if you were no longer affiliated.

LB: Heya! The beer fridge lived on in memory for quite a while, although it had mostly been repurposed by then. It's certainly where people (including me) kept our privately-purchased beer and occasionally swapped interesting brews. In a way I'm glad that the beer fridge was gone as an institution, because it made the post-1997 (Scott Krueger, idiot) alcohol crackdown and general insanity less painful. Which is good, because there was plenty of other pain to go around while that was happening.

I did a power hour once in college, actually managed to make it all the way through. Ended up being just shy of a twelve-pack for me. The next morning (and the rest of the evening, for that matter) wasn't particularly pleasant.

I didn't have a drop of alcohol until my freshman year of college (I have Jesse and Jordan from across the hall to thank for the end of that particular streak). A can of Schlitz was the innagural drink, I believe. Horrid. Also had my first liquor around this time, straight shots of rotgut gin.

I was quite the teetotaller for a while. Out of a sense of vanity, mostly--I liked being able to say I had never drank, smoked, or done any drugs ever. I actually had never smoked anything until about a year and a half ago, when a friend brought back some Cohibas from a trip overseas. And who am I to turn down a good cigar for free? Thus began my full-on descent into the world of sin.

235: Wrong, w-lfs-n. So wrong. Any "absinthe" imported into the US must be thujone-free and not contain artemisia absinthium. It's the law. Stupid, perhaps, but the law. If Customs intercept a package from abroad, they will send it back; bring it in a suitcase and they will confiscate it.

I know, from stupid past experience, that I am terrible at that. On the other hand, with slow steady drinking I can pretty much go on forever. I just choose not too -- I don't really enjoy being much ore than mildly drunk most of the time. Special occasions like New Year aside.

When I was 18 on holiday, I know I drank a truly absurd amount one hot day in Amsterdam. I'm not even going to mention numbers since it will sound like lies. However, with a long day's drinking, plenty of food, and no rush -- it was a great deal. At one point we, along with an Irish girl we met and her brother, were arm wrestling Russian sailors for pints.

I went on a whole marketing trip across the USA with a like-minded pal, and every evening we would do the joke:

"Barman, do you have Knob Creek?"

"Why yes sir"

"I'm sorry to hear that. Try and keep it quiet and get me a Scotch".

to some poor member of the service industry. The whole thing collapsed in fits of giggles and no dinner the evening we rocked up at a fish restaurant and a perky waitress said "good evening sir, tonight I have a red snapper".

ogged: What's a case? 24? That's a lot of beer. That's a lot of liquid.

Indeed. There was, however, much frenzied dancing that evening, beginning when the Broadway shows let out and continuing until well past sunup (which, this being almost exactly the winter solstice, was pretty late). I suspect that fact is the only reason I didn't die of alcohol poisoning (though there were several hours the following day when I wished I had).

Another version of the century club I recall is 100 x 12-ounce beer / 72-hour weekend. It sounds easy unless you plan to get any sleep. I came close to nailing it during Easters at UVa in 1982 but ran out of beer money (had to save enough for gas back to Davidson). I don't recommend that, but I hear it works for some people.

Well, my mom's a bartender, and has been some variation of such since before I was born and since before she herself could legally drink. And my dad's a drunk. Therefore, I own you all in this regard because my actual "cold medicine" as a child was whiskey, honey and lemon juice mixed together in a mason jar and taken by the spoonfull.

I loved that stuff and would often request more than the requisite 2 tblspns. Often the jar would be empty if Mama left me alone with it. To this day, I cannot drink a Whiskey Sour without thinking it tastes like cold medicine, and I must buy a bottle of bourbon promptly if I get a cold. I too prefer Elijah Craig, or Evan Williams, to Jack D., though Knobbs and Makers are also fine by me. I'm not a refined drinker, but a tolerant one.

Having acquired thusly a strong stomach for alcohol while young, I found it hard to get drunk once I actually started recreationally drinking. I think I was in college, sophomore year, and at my first and only frat-type party (I went to a women's college, so we were off-campus for this event), and I was drinking vodka, straight, from a wine-cooler type bottle. I remember being scolded by a security guard once we got back on campus because we were singing quite loudly on our walk to our dorm. Quite logically, we ran screaming away from him as if he were about to arrest/assault/taser us. And one of my girlfriends later vomited out the dorm window. Which would have gone better if the screen had been removed first.

The classic Glasgow drinking rite of passage is to the Clockwork Orange. All 15 stops on the underground route with a drink at every one.

The problem is that a stretch along the south of the Clyde contains some seriously scary spots with heavily sectarian pubs -- Red Hands of Ulster on the walls, etc -- where a lack of street nous or a badly judged comment could lead to the students having a very bad day.

The trick is to time it so you hit those pubs early in the day and get safely over the river by late afternoon or to be forewarned with good knowledge of which pubs to avoid.

Not the drunkest, or the first drunk, but a memorable drunk: twelve or so feet worth of surgical tubing used to make a beer funnel, with two outlets at the bottom (so you had to share). It's never occurred to me till now, but let's see, volume of a cylinder, cubic inches, ounces, 12 ounces per beer, split in half---that's 19 beers or so? That can't be right. That's a lot of beer.

I only drank for quantity once, on my 21st birthday, where we went out and had 21 drinks each. That meant vomiting and continuing to drink. That was also the time I asked a friend to accompany me to the bathroom because I was "afraid that I'd fall in." (It turns out I have made a fool of myself while drunk.)

I had an English boyfriend for a while who had tons of drinking stories. Like the one about the time he lived in Poland and got drunk at some Polish family's house on homemade vodka and was so sick at work the next day he shit himself. He soiled his underwear and had to fashion a diaper-like thing out of a plastic bag.

Then there was the time he got legless at a pub; he was closer to his girlfriend's house than he was to his place, so he went to hers. Went up to her bedroom, passed out on the bed and promptly pissed himself.

he was closer to his girlfriend's house than he was to his place, so he went to hers

A guy I knew in school was in a similar situation -- too drunk after a party, too far from home, so he crashed on a couch at a friend's house. Only what he thought was a friend's place wasn't, and he woke up with a hangover and a gun to his head. After having the shit beaten out of him, he got arrested and ended up elisting in the military to get straightened out. Some party.

I friend of mine, when we were teenagers, used to live in a little council flat on an estate that was mostly old people's sheltered housing. We went out drinking one night and I put him in a taxi home. We hadn't even drunk that much but he always had a low tolerance.

He got home and his key wouldn't work, so he broke in the window, climbed into bed and fell asleep ....

... beside the old lady who lived there. The next morning the police turned up and he was rudely awoken and dragged out bed in handcuffs, completely oblivious to what had happened. The taxi had dropped him off one street up from his and he'd not realised.

Luckily, it turned out the old lady was the grandmother of a friend of ours and after she got over the shock, she saw the funny side. She did make him come round and do her garden every weekend for months though, by way of recompense.

I'm late, but I think I'll answer the post's question. Other than sips of parents' wine, which I had whenever they felt like offering and always though were disgusting, a screwdriver when I was 15 and snuck vodka out of my parents unused liquor cabinet to see what it was like. Sorry, mom and dad. Unless, rather than ever, you meant my first drink today. I haven't started yet.

My father was once given a bottle of whisky by a grateful student. Since he and mum hardly drank it was put in cupboard in the kitchen and left there. When I was about eleven I climbed up and got it down, poured a thimbleful into a glass, topped it up with water and feeling terribly reckless drank it. Needless to say I was disappointed with the results.

I has my first beer at 14 or 15 and didn't like it at all. I changed my mind fairly quickly.

I didn't drink at all in high school (aside from wine at Shabbos and the seder) because I was always driving, and when I got to college I was so used to not drinking that I didn't bother to start.

The last day of my German class fall semester of freshman year we had a sort of show-and-tell assignment to bring in something and talk about it, and one guy brought in a six-pack of Löwenbräu, which he afterwards distributed to rest of the class. I brought mine home for the vacation and kept it in a desk drawer until New Year's Eve, when I opened and drank it at midnight. It was good.

When I got back to school in the spring I started drinking moderately at parties. The empty bottle is still in my desk drawer at home.

We just did honey-and-lemon, but there is a family story about how I was a wailing teething infant and my dad, at his wits' end, dipped his finger in Scotch and rubbed it on my gums and I slept... like a baby.

In college, there were more than a few cases of girls wandering into other girls' room and sleeping on the couch, and finding out the next morning that they were in X-10Y on floor X-1, not X0Y.

I didn't drink much in college till I was 21, because the freshman-drink-a-case didn't appeal to me. Then I discovered margarita nights.

Just remembered! It won't actually be the brother I'm taking out drinking's first drink. When we were visiting my crazy aunt and uncle in Montana about 16 years ago, we were playing Pictionary and the adults were drinking. Bro went around and started swigging the remains from the adults' empties and we were so engrossed with the board game that nobody noticed until he started staggering around. (I don't know how old he was but old enough to walk, yet still in diapers.) He started to cry and grabbing at his crotch like he was in a lot of pain. My mother took off his diaper to see what was wrong and he had an erection that wouldn't go away. (Can't believe I'm telling this story.) All of the adults (who were kind of drunk) were all trying to figure out what to do and I remember my mother asking my uncle how he got rid of an unwanted erection and he said that he thought of dead cats.

My brother can now never find this blog as he will be mortally embarrassed.

Audrey, 21 months, grabs every damn drink around her to get a taste. She likes wine, beer, and vodka tonics, but is less sure about bourbon. (She's never gotten more than about three drops at a time--she just grabs empties off of tables.)

I remember my mother asking my uncle how he got rid of an unwanted erection

Why do you think this was painful? because it blocks urination probably. Infant erections are surprising but real. I have no memory of what psychological states accompany them; probably none in particular. I occasionally still have some like that, apparently w/o conscious sexual association.

"The interesting thing to me about Liz was that she let the most extraordinary things hang out on a public-realm blog for all to see. Lots of people do it, but they don't all call themselves introverts. My guess is that it might have the same effect as talking to a therapist: a confessional mode directed at an unseen readership, at people who don't know you and therefore have no stake either way in what you have to say." There is more

I visit a lot of blogs, but Unfogged is a particularly interesting one in some ways.

PK drank beer too when he was that age. Then they get older and decide it tastes bad. It's no big deal.

306: My observation of PK's erections suggests to me that they are a lot like grownup men's erections. Morning wood, nighttime or otherwise idle masturbation (less purposeful than adult masturbation, probably) while being read to or cuddling, bathtime self-exploration.

Henry's eleven, which is older than PK, I think. He's graduated from drinking-out-of-childish-curiosity to precocious let's-shock-the-adults teenagerishness. He likes to discuss his favourite beers in a loud voice while visitors are present.

Well, I had a funny erection story, but in light of 311: the most I've ever hurt myself while drinking was when I jumped off a third floor balcony trying to get to the ground. It just seemed easier and faster than walking down all those stairs, and I thought it would be no big deal and would be nice and soft on the landing because there was snow on the ground. Well, it turns out 1/2" of snow doesn't do all that much to cushion a fall. Funniest thing was I basically got right up and insisted I was fine ("a little sore, but everything's okay") and really believed that too. I went home and passed out and then woke up in excrutiating pain about 3:30 in the morning and had to go to the hospital.

Chicken soup with sage, marjoram, and cracked red pepper kills colds. The only trouble is living alone when one is ill and having to make it while ill. However. Cayenne pepper is pretty much a magic powder.

Alcohol in the breast milk is an interesting phenomenon, not alas, one I experienced. At least I've never heard of nursing mothers being bullied by busybodies in bars, as pregnant women apparently sometimes are. My wife was amused at the effect on our daughter once, but didn't make a practice of it.

I also once lit my hair on fire lighting a cigarette on a giant outdoor space heater. Another time, I passed out face down outdoors in the snow and woke up the next morning (a few hours later) with severe frostbite on my face. (I haven't gotten to any of the embarrassing stories yet.)

Also, I guarantee I'm an honorary member of the Century club, although I've never actually counted it out (nor heard of it, before now.)

For a while I wondered why sometimes it was soft, and sometimes it was hard. I thought of asking my parents, but was too embarrassed. Eventually I noticed that it was hard everytime a Salt & Pepa video, and put two and two together.

I remember ejaculating a non-liquid substance shortly before puberty really kicked in. It was like a yellow powder. I'm not absolutely sure of that, though.

I once literally crawled on my hands and knees for several blocks until I made it back to my dorm. I proceeded to puke in my underwear drawer, and then passed out. I woke up the next morning in a puddle of cold additional vomit, rolled over and went back to sleep in my vomit.

Ok, not really explode, but squirting not dribbling blood thru multiple pores. Like a garden sprinkler. Blood pressure thing, he was a Leaving Las Vegas kinda dude. Vietnamese dude owned the parking lot where the drunk parked his immobile pickup. Lived in the pickup. Vietnamese dude complained a lot, but never called the cops. Vietnamese guy says to me:"Hey, I lost son Vietnam too I don't give up on life." I don't say anything.

I was being absurd. But we did put the lit end in our mouths to blow/force the smoke into our friend's lungs. Called it "shotguns" Girl I thought I loved once let go so the joint went to the back of my throat. Could have been an accident. She had a huge overbite that only showed when she laughed. She had three babies before she was 21 and got lost in a trailer park.

314: One of my roommates freshman year jumped off our third-story balcony under the mistaken impression that he could reenact Luke Skywalker's famous dive from Jabba the Hutt's barge (from the beginning of Return of the Jedi) using a can of beer as a lightsaber.

Astonishingly, he was dead drunk when he did it. Actually astonishingly, he was completely unhurt by the experience, though he couldn't walk for about ten minutes thereafter.

I grant that I have not tried it since that initial experience at 18, when any liquor at all wasn't particularly pleasing to me. Also, they were just straight shots. Which I don't like even with good gin. A reëvaluation may be in order.

Hey Ben, as Gin Man, what do you have to say about Plymouth? I bought a bottle of that recently and have been drinking a lot of it mixed with tonic water, pretty strong. And happy about it. Also: what is the proper recipe for gin and tonic? I have been filling a highball glass about half way with ice cubes, dropping some mint leaves in, covering the ice cubes with gin, and filling the glass with tonic, plus a wedge of lime or lemon -- it seems like this should give roughly 1 part gin to 2 parts tonic water. I don't know if that's the correct proportion but it seems to taste good.

Mint is unorthodox in a gin and tonic; all I do is squeeze lime in, put ice in, put lime hull in, put gin in, put tonic in. I don't have any strong opinions about proportions or anything.

The only thing I really know about Plymouth gin is that it's a distinct style from the ubiquitous London gin and can, I think, only be distilled in Plymouth (whereas London gin can obviously be distilled anywhere). I've had it only at a party where what could be done with it was pretty dismal but I recall liking it.

Hey BTW Ben -- we watched "The Court Jester" last night, which you did not exactly recommend but nonetheless I found out about it via your post titled, "The Flagon Wiith the Dragon has the Brew That is True" (or words to that effect) -- it was funny and a good time. But the young'un kept on asking me who was the good guys and who the bad guys.

362: Plymouth, being lower proof than most gins around here, has become the spirit of choice for a Blue Cheese Martini in these parts (which isn't actually a martini, but whatever). Chill the Plymouth over ice, then stuff some number of pitted green olives -- my friends go with three but I think four or five would be better :) -- with blue cheese. Skewer the olives, strain the gin, dunk the olives in and swizzle. Absolutely delicious.

As for G&Ts, I've been known to give a multi-hour symposium on the precise proportions of gin-to-tonic-to-lime the key point of which is: almost every bar puts too much damn gin in. I've actually forgotten most of the details [sad, I know] but I think the right proportions are about 1-3, 1-4 gin-to-tonic depending on the proof, the nose and how much lime you use. Properly constructed, you should be almost unaware that you're drinking alcohol until you're legless.

[All of the above is YMMV, naturally, where "YMMV" == "God's own truth".]

Why would 1 part gin to 3 or 4 parts tonic be more expensive than equal parts gin and tonic? Gin is more expensive than tonic water is it not? And presumably you're going to get drunk after about the same quantity of gin regardless of how strong the drinks are, since the tonic water is not alcoholic. So I can't see how weaker drinks would end up more expensive.

I think the Apostropher meant that a bar is gonna charge you $6 (or $8, or $10+) per gin+tonic no matter how they make it, and if they make it 1-3 or 4 instead of 1-1, it's going to take a whole lot of drinks to get you drunk.

Holy shit, that's great--one of my favorite songs ever. I suspect that I've listened to it, in one of the various recordings they made of it, more than just about anything else (did I mention this in another recent thread? I think I did.) As for 376, stop with the hatin': by the way she's dressed, this is from their mid/late '70's Sufi period. She's getting all mystical and shit.

Yes, expensive in a bar. My 20th high school reunion is this weekend (the school from which I was expelled, not the one from which I graduated), so I was at a bar for the late-night unofficial gathering last night and am heading out again shortly.

Interesting how some people look exactly the same and others are nearly unrecognizable.

380: If you're doing it in a bar, the trick is to load up on something cheap first then cruise on the gin afterwards. As for the taste, IME most people have trouble actually tasting the gin in higher concentrations; the alcohol masks the subtler flavors, both on the nose and on the tongue. [Not true of the darker liquors but I never figured out why.] If you've got the palate for 1:1, though, go for it.

Although I forgot one other trick you can sometimes play if the drink is too strong: order a gin and tonic, then order a glass of tonic water and a few limes on the side. Presto, one drink becomes two or three for a fraction of the cost.